PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

When, on the morning after

the witches' sabbat, the Horned

leads us up out of the woods and,

to the singing of meadowlarks,

mounts the horizon and,

lambent with white flame,

disappears over the edge,

I've always wondered whether

he sinks down into Earth

or walks off into the Sky,

or maybe both;

but now I know.

I, Steven of Prodea,

Steven son of Russell,

with my own eyes have seen

the Gates of Heaven swing

wide to admit him, and lo!

to the sounding of horns

and trumpets he entered in,

and lo! the gates were shut.

This with my own lips I tell you,

and what I tell is true.

Myth meets myth.

“Why do they hate us so much?” a boy growing up Evangelical once asked his father.

(True or not, this is a common belief among Evangelical Christians.)

“Because so many Christians are such jerks,” his father told him.

There are forms of Christianity that I, as a pagan, respect, even admire.

With its intellectual vacuity, utter lack of social conscience, and political triumphalism, Evangelicalism is decidedly not one of them.

Like many gender-non-conforming kids, I grew up socially isolated.

Elementary school wasn't so bad. Having grown up with me, the other kids mostly just accepted me for who I was. Junior high, though, was hellish. There I was the weird kid, the outsider. (There must be easier ways to learn self-reliance.) In high school I finally made some friends among the other egghead creatives. I loved my new friends all the better for understanding the worth of what I'd worked so hard to gain.

Then I lost most of those friends again to the so-called “Jesus Revolution.”

By then, my pagan identity was already fully formed. I could see their so-called “revolution” for what it actually was: a total abrogation of intelligence, an unthinking embrace of the worst kind of reactionary conservatism.

(I was right. My former friends and their co-religionists were precisely the demographic that betrayed us to Reagan and his successors, including Trump.)

Suddenly, the witch-boy was the pariah again. Finally, I decided to end it.

This is a drabsha.

Unrelated to the Christian cross (but is it?), the drabsha is an important symbol of the Mandaeans, called the Last Gnostics, an ethno-religious minority originally from the southeastern Middle East, now dispersed throughout the world.

A wooden cross draped with a white silk cloth and decked with branches of laurel, it symbolizes the light of the supreme god Hayyi Rabbi, “the Great Life,” covering the four quarters of the world.

This is a stang.

One of humanity's oldest gods, the Horned is still worshiped around the world.

We do him no wrong if we think of him as the collective body of animal life on planet Earth.

Through the Hidden Centuries, the witches of the West kept faith with him and his ancient ways, as they still do.

In our day, once again, he raises up a people to himself.

Tell now of the Horned, His Bestiary.

Soon told.

For is this not his Book of Beasts, and him the All-Beast? in which is told the likeness of each beast, and kind, and singularity: its life and loves and ways, and life within his life?

For are they not in him, and he in them?

Is his life not in them, and theirs in him?

And does he not delight in them, as they in him?

His the life-in-great, and theirs in-small?

And every birth of them an increase to his being, and every death, diminishment?

And, being beasts ourselves, does not our love go out to them, and so to him?

To him the All-Beast, one-in-many, manyness in one?

“My gods, Steven: you haven't aged a bit in 20 years!”

To be sure, my friend is being generous. The widow's peak continues its northward recession, and shows more gray than it used to. My face is finally getting that doughy look that all Posches get as we age.

Still, I'll take the compliment. For a man of my age, I'm looking good. I keep engaged and active, and I'm seeing the long-term health benefits of lifelong vegetarianism. A couple-three years ago, I started in on the Regimen: Grand Sabbat was coming up and, when you're giving your body to a god, you need to look as good as you possibly can. For all the work that it's been, I'm pretty pleased with the results. As usual, when you give to a god, he gives back; but he gives as a god gives.

“Oh, you know how it is,” I joke. “Sell your soul to the Horned, get eternal youth and beauty.”

They say that the Horned, god of witches, has a cloak of invisibility.

Dernmantle, they call it—a dern is a secret—for which reason Dernmantle is counted among his many by-names. Remind me to tell you some time the tale of how he came by it.

(Some, though, call it a cap or helm: the Dernhelm.)

In this way, he walks among us, unknown, unseen. Lord of Beasts, where animals are, he is: nor do we always see him.

Down the long years, he has walked unseen. Through the hidden centuries, he walked among us still.

We, his people, are like to him. We, too, have the power to walk unseen.